>a seemingly very complex problem that I had no idea how to approach can be made simple by breaking it down into the right primitives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

From the Publications section of that Wikipedia page:

>The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",[22][23] concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering.[24] The paper is considered to be the earliest work to formally outline the top-down method for designing programs.[25][26] The article was discussed by Fred Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.[27][28]